If Rewilding Is Colonised, How to Remake Wilderness? With Cal Flyn

‘A brilliant exploration of wildness in both nature and humankind.’ That's what Alice Winn said about the new book by Cal Flyn. Cal is an award-winning writer from the Highlands of Scotland, and the book is called The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness. 

A five-year odyssey she sometimes thought would kill her, Cal travelled the world exploring the concept of wilderness as it ‘shifted from a spiritual notion to an aesthetic and later to an (increasingly controversial) conservation ideal.’ Which led to a critical question, as we go about things like rewilding and the 30 by 30 conservation target, how do we decolonise that ideal, while not losing all it has gained? 

Then, having been introduced to the new book, I got even more excited looking over Cal’s back catalogue. Her previous book was the award-winning best-seller, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape. What a collection of stories that was too. And out of both books, Cal says ‘coming out hopeful was a surprise to me.’

But we start with her first book, being on her harrowing connection with Australia. Thicker Than Water emerged as she traced the path of a distant relative who became fêted as a pioneer hero in Australia, but has more recently been implicated as ringleader of a number of brutal massacres of the Gunai Aboriginal people.

We talk about all this, the telling connections across some of her most extraordinary encounters, and what Cal’s found in herself, the rest of us, and the rest of nature, that continues to surprise and inspire.

Chapter markers & transcript.

Recorded 4 June 2026.

Title image of Cal sourced from The Guardian.

Music: 

Scotland Mountains, by Angel Salazar (from Artlist).

Regeneration, by Amelia Barden.

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Transcript

Why Wilderness Still Divides Us

Cal 0:06

For the last few decades, people have been having an increasingly fraught discussion about can we take this sort of colonial mindset out of our way of talking and preserving wild lands without losing the wild lands, because actually the Wilderness Act has managed to protect some incredible landscapes, really, really valuable landscapes, and environmentally it's been a huge success. It's just got this sort of flawed manner of thinking sewn through it. And we're beginning to see this discussion spread out from the very United States context that it began in to across the global environmental movement.

AJ 0:51

G'day, Anthony James here for The RegenNarration, featuring the stories that are changing the story, enabling the regeneration of this mysterious planet. A brilliant exploration of wildness in both nature and humankind. Alice Winn said that about the new book by Cal Flyn. Cal is an award-winning writer from the Highlands of Scotland. And the new book is called The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness. A five-year odyssey she sometimes thought would kill her, Cal travelled the world exploring the concept of wilderness as it shifted from a spiritual notion to an aesthetic and later to an increasingly controversial conservation ideal. Which led to a critical question: How do we decolonize that ideal while not losing all it's gained? Then, having been introduced to the new book, I got even more excited looking over Cal's back catalogue. Her previous book was the award-winning bestseller, Islands of Abandonment, Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape. What a collection of stories that was, too. And out of both books, Cal says, coming out hopeful was a surprise to me. But we start with her first book, being on her harrowing connection with Australia. Thicker Than Water emerged as she traced the path of a distant relative who became fated as a pioneer hero in Australia, but has more recently been implicated as a ringleader of a number of brutal massacres of the Gunai Aboriginal people. We talk about all this, the telling connections across some of her most extraordinary encounters, and what Cal's found in herself, the rest of us, and the rest of nature that continues to surprise and inspire. Hello, Cal, how are you?

Cal 2:42

Hi, I'm great. Thank you so much. Really happy to be speaking to you.

AJ 2:46

Oh Cal, I'm really happy to be speaking to you. I hadn't come across your work until your publisher got in touch, and I was like, how can I not have come across your work? So it's been a real blessing. They were good enough to send me not just your current book, but the one prior to that. And then I learned about your one prior to that, which I'd love to talk about. Perhaps predictably enough given it relates to your Australian links. But before we go there, can you bring us into where

Finding The Island In Glasgow

AJ 3:12

you are? What does home look and feel like to you right now?

Cal 3:15

Well, home has been in flux for the last few last couple of years. So um for five years we lived in the far north of Scotland and the Orkney Islands. And then I've just recently come back from teaching in Connecticut for an academic year, and I've moved to Glasgow. So my partner and I are just getting started in Glasgow in an area next to Queen's Park. It's a very kind of leafy, sandstony kind of place, and we've got a garden flat. So yeah, we're just getting to know this brand new neighborhood, um, which is very um arty and vibrant, and a lot a lot is going on. So yeah, it's it's exciting. We thought maybe coming here sort of indirectly from an island community that we would find it difficult moving to the city, but actually it's a super friendly city and people are willing to chat in a way that people love to chat on the island. So I think we're we're trying to find the island in the city.

AJ 4:18

Yeah, it's a famous city for it now. I mean, I've even got a good friend here in Australia, many people will remember from the podcast too, Katherine Trebeck, lived in Glasgow uh for 10 years, came back home, but misses it every day. And I only just read headlines the other day about some extraordinary uh rallying around immigrants. I can't remember what it was, but there was a flashpoint news thing.

Cal 4:42

The Battle of Kenmuir Street. Yeah.

AJ 4:44

That was it, wasn't it? Yes, Carol.

Cal 4:46

What was that again? Uh that's actually in our neighborhood. It's um people were being forcefully removed to be deported, and the whole neighborhood turned out and blocked the streets by standing in the street, and a guy went underneath the the immigration van and like held onto the um wheels so that the van couldn't move. And they were there for a really, really long time until the the state essentially had to give up. And I think that does reflect so much this um partly how diverse the city is, but also like how absorbed many of the immigrant communities have become. Glasgow is a place that people have immigrated to for a really long time, and that's a part of the makeup and the personality of the city, and people really pride themselves on that. And I think certainly in the in the Scottish context, that's quite unusual. We're not a um super diverse country generally, but Glasgow is, and that's what it's made as sort of like a big part of its identity.

Tracing A Family Link To Massacre

AJ 5:40

Fascinating. Yeah, and I did think of the spirit that I'd heard so much about of Glasgow when I heard that. So my next point of curiosity was already, even before I knew of the back catalogue of books you've got, was if you had, if you happen to have Australian links, and then I find your first book was all about that, and in a confronting enough kind of a way, how was that process? And I guess, yeah, in light of your 10 years since.

Cal 6:11

So my first book, Thicker Than Water, is uh family story, I suppose, about um someone, uh my great-great-great uncle who left Scotland during the time of the Highland Clearances. Um this was a big upheaval in mainly the north and west of Scotland. Um, people were being turfed off the land and they were going overseas. Um so lots of Scots went to Australia, but also Canada and all around the world. And um, I had heard that one of our relatives, a fairly distant relative, had become an explorer in Australia. And because I love to travel and I'm interested in exploring as a concept, um, this really excited me. And so I started learning more about him. And then as I was googling around this name, Angus Macmillan, I turned up a lot of very uncomfortable coverage that indicated he'd been sort of fingerpointed as maybe being a ringleader of a massacre of Ganae Kernai people in the southeastern of Australia in an area called Gippsland in Victoria. I found this really shocking um to have a link to this colonial violence. And what I started doing was sort of following his story from Scotland to Gippsland, how he'd got there, what had happened, and how this sort of Highland boy, who his diaries would show was really idealistic, very um pious, um, you know, real head boy material, how how he'd turn from this boy to what we believe to be a sort of murderous killer um in the space of about five years after he arrived in Australia. It's not actually a very unusual story, but we had his insight um into his mind in the form of these journals and and some newspaper reports at his time, although none of them were willing to confront exactly what was happening um in this community. So any discussions of violence was really oblique or or sort of passing mentions. It was like whispered asides, um, which I also found really shocking. I'd I I'd read a lot about the frontier in America where people would really talk openly about wars and things like this, whereas in Australia it was so secretive and you had to do a lot of piecing things together. I came across to to Gippsland three times during the the research and went on a bit of a trail to to retrace his steps, like how he'd come into the area originally where he'd lived, and and also to make contact with the Ganai Koranai people who many of whom were a bit hesitant about meeting me and speaking to me for obvious reasons. It's kind of an awkward thing to do. And so it set me down a path of of thinking about um I don't know, inherited guilt, apologies, reparations, like what what place of those? Um and in some sense it's nice to be an outsider because you can come in and ask really quite stupid basic questions. Um and in other ways, I guess probably in the longer term, I found it quite strange to be an outsider because um the country continues to have this debate um in my absence since since I left. Um and there's a constant back and forth about what to do, how to better recognize Aboriginal rights, Aboriginal um histories in the land. And um every so often I'm called up by, I don't know, Guardian Australia or something like this, and asked to give a a quote. And I I I started to feel no longer comfortable being uh a commentator on this because I think, well, A, really it needs to be Aboriginal voices coming to the fore. And also I think it's so important that it should be the local community discussing it together rather than me sort of imposing what I reckon should be going on. And so yeah, I've I've got sort of complicated feelings about it because it was a hard road and uh, as you say, confronting. That's a real Australian, a real Australian world word.

AJ 10:10

Is it this is always interesting having it reflected back at you, things you you don't know about yourself. So yeah, I can only imagine though, and I don't know, it feels like certainly kudos to you for going there. This is happening more here that white fellas are finding out, and I think part of it's just reconnecting with our own lost heritage. Like it was all I've heard more than one person refer to it as the Great Australian Silence. Like we didn't talk about what if we had convict heritage, we didn't talk about if there was dark stuff like this, and we just lost contact for all sorts of good and bad reasons as well. So there's so much more by way of genealogy and ancestor work going on, and with that, discoveries like this, and some pretty high-profile books have come out since yours with similar tales and how they've tried to grapple with it. And I think that can only be a good thing. In this case, I you know, I was curious, in the absence of having read your book yet, this that book, I just looked around at myself who this Angus Macmillan person was, and to be dubbed the discoverer of Gippsland, no less, so a prominent settler, later an MP for Victoria, named many rivers that I've paddled on, like the Mitchell, I had no idea, had a federal seat of politics named after him, but that was changed. That seems to be the one mark of change. There are many statues still, apparently, but the seat was changed after I don't know how much of role your book had in it, but was changed a couple of years after you'd written your story in 2018. And I'm captivated by the questions you've partly alluded to here that it sounds like you went in with, including how does head school material end up doing that? How does victim of highland clearances end up perpetrating a clearance of his own or being part of a clearance like that in a new land? And I guess, yeah, the bit that is yours, mine, others' responsibility to broach

How Frontier Fear Becomes Violence

AJ 12:20

that. Did you come aw away with any answers of note to those questions?

Cal 12:25

I think one thing that I found really interesting. I had some discussions with Ganae Corona people who were talking about the the Land and Waters Corporation. Um, so they've taken over some of um the stateland and and they run things locally. And um one thing they noted was that to work in this system, essentially they have to run things in a white fellow way. That you have to adopt like this corporate mentality and you have to adopt a corporate calendar and all of these kind of things. And so there's a sort of inherent friction in that, but I think that the the handing over of power and land and things and and accepting that the government will have less control or the local white community might have less control is kind of baked into the process. And I think that that is uh is certainly a good thing, and increasingly allowing um Aboriginal groups to to run things in a way that they see appropriate, even if um the previous power holders don't agree. Um, I think that that is uh is is very difficult in that process. It's kind of a messy process, but I think that that's really important. And I also think more broadly that I went on a bit of a road trip with a young um Ganai, Carnai artist, Stephen Payton. I mean, we were both youngish at the time, I guess we're of of ages. Um and he's done a lot of really interesting artwork, um, sort of looking at uh these more intangible um questions of memory and and who who gets celebrated. And he took down one of the Macmillan cairns and put it in a gallery, deconstructed and and and things like this. So um I think his work is really interesting. He continues to work, and he's always sort of grappling with these questions really um in intelligently.

AJ 14:22

Did you have a feel for what happened to the man? Like how did he come from where he came and end up like he did?

Cal 14:31

I think a big part of the story in Australia was all tied up with pure opportunism, right? You you come from nothing or a difficult situation, you arrive and in frontier cultures there's this idea that the only thing that's stopping you is your own fear, your own um, you know, if you you can just go out and and do something with yourself. So I think that that is where it began for him, that he trained, um he he went to work in a station, he was a good horseman, he became quite high up in a sort of pastoral company, and then he was charged with going to find more land. And this may or may not be described as being an explorer in this context. And so he he went down through the Australian Alps and then he sort of came out into this new land. And what he saw, he talked about this discovery of this land as he saw it, was a land that could feed all of his countrymen. That's how he thought, because Scotland was in such a bad state, and he'd come to this country that seemed to be plenty for everyone, and especially for and so he called it Cl Caledonia Australis, and it was later renamed Gippsland. And so it's coming, I suppose, from perhaps an idealistic, but certainly an opportunistic um place. And then as he came to settle this place and it became clear that the the white men were not going to leave, of course, the original inhabitants who were there became increasingly angry and upset and worried that if they didn't do something about it, they w they would lose this land, which ultimately they would to a large extent. And so they started to have like violent skirmishes, essentially, and that's when everything got really quickly out of control because the white men would carry guns, and once the white men had started setting up stations, they had a lot more to lose. Sometimes they had wives, sometimes they had family, and that's when um they would actually start going out in essentially hunting parties, they would start the fight um and would attack entire encampments with men, women and children. And I think that it it came from what seemed like quite a small flashpoint, just grew and grew and grew, and then the um firepower that the British settlers or s the European settlers had with them meant that it increasingly became a very unfair fight. And I think they became inured to it very quickly. They're pretty dark, they're they're cut off from the outside world. I believe they knew this to be illegal at the time, but if you are in a kind of vacuum and you're frightened, because I do think that these men were probably frightened and they were acting irrationally um and aggressively, I I suppose that's where it is. Um they they started making their own moral codes. I I found that sort of the the yeah, the vacuum of of morality really um difficult to to get my head around.

AJ 17:35

Oh, is it what? But I think you've explained it very well. Certainly mapping on to my understanding of different contexts I've been in as well. And I'm s I don't know if you feel this, Carol. I'd be curious. I started to feel a connection between your new book and your experiences there. And I wondered how, you know, your personal connections to mob, to use an Australian word, in the process of writing that book, and how some of it, yeah, was was confronting, not always easy. And then some of the connections you made on your travels for this book, The Savage Landscape, that went to indigenous communities in different parts at times as well. And that didn't sound easy always either, huh? So I'm wondering, do you have you felt that? Have you felt that the connection between that work and this one? I mean, has it really informed this one? And or have you sort of noted it in retrospective, like a bigger journey's unfolding here for me?

When Good Intentions Do Damage

Cal 18:38

Oh yes, I think I think writing that first book, I guess I was fairly starting from a place of naivety, maybe to begin with. And it took quite a long time for me to understand a lot of things about the colonial mindset that once I saw it, I couldn't unsee, and I've started to see it in all sorts of different contexts. Um, and so one of the things that jumped out at me during the research of Thicker Than Water was that actually a lot of the sort of most long-term harms that have been committed against Aboriginal people in Australia have often been the result of well-meaning people after the violence was over. And that was a sort of huge uh revelation to me at the time and is something that I have started noticing all over the place that actually good intentions is does not always have good effects. And um, so from my previous book, uh Islands of Abandonment, which is about how abandoned places can be incredibly environmentally vibrant and um left to their own devices, they might become incredibly biodiverse and they look messy, but actually they're s maybe more environmentally valuable than um some nature reserves. Um that partly sort of chimed with the that same realization, which was that actually if we're always going in and sort of messing around with nature, um, we can be disturbing its processes. And this third book of mine, um The Savage Landscape, the buttons come out, it sort of brings these two things together, which um I'm talking about um uncontrolled nature and um our attitudes towards it, our uh intensity of wanting to control the world. Um, so that's always one of the themes that I keep coming back to, but also the way that um our competing um priorities, ethical priorities, I suppose, which might be to save the world or to help indigenous people uh v uh have have better land rights, might actually be completely um in conflict with each other. And we see this uh in many places around the world where, so uh for example, I went to uh the Varunga Mountains in the southwestern corner um where it meets Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo to look at the mountain gorillas that Diane Fossey made so famous. Um their numbers have been really rebounding because they've been protected um and and policed by rangers with AK-47s. And this has been um a real success story from one direction, but the local people who were forest people um were turfed out essentially so that the the national park could be policed, and they are the ones who have paid the price. And so I think these moral tensions are things that I I guess my eye is drawn to, and um the quandary of of what is right is always so uh so complicated to get your head around. I definitely think that writing thicker than water has kind of changed the course of um my writing career, and certainly it's changed the way that I think and recognize our behavior in the world um by our um who am I talking about? I suppose in the First book, I was talking about the British Empire and its i inheritors, and in the savage landscape, it might be Western conservation or wilderness preservation, something like this.

AJ 22:15

Because you also turned up stories that some of the horrifying evictions of people are still happening. Some of the stuff certainly that I heard about early in my days of studying this stuff and this uh I guess this concern for the planet uh going back the decades. And yeah, I I didn't know quite such graphic clearance, if we hark back to the language you started with, was still going on, but in the name of good. Well, I guess it was the name of good back then too, eh? In the name of conservation. This is the interesting thing, isn't it? It's in the name of good. If you think you're on the good ship, it's almost anything can go, but that's a really dangerous place to be. And you you've highlighted things like uh rewilding and um and the 30 by 30 concept. That could be quote unquote the biggest land grab ever. I mean it doesn't have to be, but it could be. So you've grappled with this, and I'm so curious how much that was a surprise for you, or you sort of saw it coming from way out, and perhaps some of the reactions you've been observing to the suggestion. And indeed, like, what do we

The Wilderness Act And Its Shadow

AJ 23:27

do then?

Cal 23:27

Yeah, I I think I what I find interesting is that um So the the question of what is a wilderness has been a big question in North America for a few decades, and the the um they brought in this legislation in the 60s called the Wilderness Act, in which they defined what a wilderness is so that they could save it, and a wilderness should be um it's a place where man is a visitor who should not remain. That was how they defined it. It's a really sort of lyrical way of talking about um an idea of a landscape that is sort of empty, and the American um settlers had come in and seen it sort of ready for the taking. Um, because that that's that's what that mode of thinking expressed in in different languages decades later. So for the last few decades, people have been having an increasingly fraught discussion about can we take this sort of colonial mindset out of our way of talking and preserving wild lands without losing the wild lands? Because actually the Wilderness Act has managed to protect some incredible landscapes, really, really valuable landscapes, and environmentally it's been a huge success. It's just got this sort of flawed manner of thinking sewn through it. And we're beginning to see this discussion spread out from the very United States context that it began in to across the global environmental movement. So you'll find environmental movements have had a lot of damaging, like PR damaging um fights with indigenous groups all over the place. Um famously, um, Greenpeace had a fight with indigenous people in the North America over seal clubbing, you know, which is a very traditional mode of being. That's, I mean, what else are you going to eat? And there have been lots of kind of similar, very bruising fights that they've had. It's uh not just Greenpeace, but all of these international movements um is a bit unseemly when you're sort of fighting with forest people and fighting with nomadic herders and so on. And so a lot of these groups have realized that actually it's not a good thing to be going in guns blazing, saying, we're gonna save this country from its countrymen. And that shift in the way of talking and to thinking, how can we work with local communities? In fact, local communities who have been able to coexist with these incredible landscapes and the, you know, the predators in the environment or really unusual um species, they've actually got this far doing what they're doing. And what can we do to make sure that they can continue working alongside each other, existing alongside each other? You know, how can we protect everyone, including the people? And so this is becoming slowly the new ideal. But as I say, it's very difficult because you've got to work with people who don't necessarily see eye to eye. The scientists, of course, will come in talking in scientific terms, which might not be recognized by the local people. They might be talking in spiritual terms or they might be talking in um still ethical terms, but but but differently. They sort of talk past each other. And so how do we um figure out a way for everyone to get what they want, which um in this particular context is it's protecting not only the environment but these um essentially endangered cultures within them.

AJ 26:57

Yeah. I have in mind as as you talk the experience you had, the snow leopard experience, that really brought you into a visceral moment of thinking about what it means to take each worldview seriously. That the scientific and the I mean, plenty of indigenous people here have talked to you about indigenous science. You know, that they claim the word now. Uh, but just different ways of knowing that they can operate together. And you found yourself in a context with your snow lippard story that really um put you in the heart of coming to terms with that and in a pretty powerful way. Would you bring us

The Lama And The Unseen Snow Leopard

AJ 27:40

into that?

Cal 27:40

Yes, I I think you might be speaking about the the llama who I met in the high up in an area of the Himalaya uh Himalayas called Dolpo. Um so it's w quite well known in the outside world because uh an American writer Peter Matheson um wrote a book called The Snow Leopard about um going there with George Scheller, uh biologist. Um they were actually going in in search of blue sheep, but I think that didn't sound sexy enough for Matheson, so he he decided he was on his own like private um journey to find the snow leopard. And um so he hiked up slowly, slowly, slowly towards the Crystal Mountain, which is a huge landmark there and where there's a monastery there. And um he wrote about coming to terms with um not seeing the snow leopard at any point, you know. Just like him when I was there, I would find the pug marks in the snow, these um pressed-in footprints. You can be aware of them in the environment. People say that perhaps they've had depredations on their livestock from the snow leopard. So they're very present, but you probably will never see one, and you probably will never see one in your lifetime. And um this became a bit of a uh metaphor for me, I suppose. I started thinking for for Matheson, it was enlightenment, the fact that the when he sees the snow leopard, it will because he's he's ready to see it. Um and then he got all the way to the end of his journey and he never saw the snow leopard. And he there's this wonderful line when he says something like, I never saw it, and and isn't that wonderful? You know, um, it's it's a beautiful book. And uh I was going up looking for snow leopards, of course, and we were leaving camera traps, which seems somehow like cheating, but I couldn't understand why it's a different time. Um and so we're we're going up and uh we passed through this village called Pangmo, and um a young man called Giapo, who who lives there with his wife, but he he speaks good English from going to school in Kathmandu, um, said, Would you like to go to our spiritual advisor? This is an incredibly religious, small village. Um the way that the Dolpo people run their affairs is extremely tied up in their religion, which is the Bon religion, is kind of like a version of Tibetan Buddhism, but that's got a lot of animist elements, so it's a very ancient religion in which they believe all rocks, trees, landscapes, landforms, animals, even, um, are either owned by or represent um some kind of local deity. They might be quite wrathful gods. These are like terrifying figures in the in the landscape. And so they make deals with these figures. Um, if they would like to build a new house, you have to make offerings to maybe the river so that you can take some of the big boulders from the river and and so on. It's a a lot of bartering with the local gods. He said, uh, my spiritual advisor lives at the top of this mountain. Would you like to come with us? And so we hiked up into the mountain and we met this lama who was living um a very you know, an elderly man who was living a very, very long way from the village. Um, he had a small, I suppose you'd call it a kitchen garden and a lot of shrines, and he spent his time hanging those um prayer flags along the ridgeline. And he said, he allowed us to have uh an audience with him, sort of sitting cross-legged on the roof of his house. And he said that he has learned through his time there that if he stays in his place and he is at one with the landscape and he is at one with the gods, I suppose, the wildlife will come to him. And so the the deer will come to him and he named several days of the month when he said they would always come. There, they're special days in in Tibetan Buddh Buddhism three three a month. And he said, Oh, the snow leopards, the snow leopards come here too. You know, it was like casual. He was throwing it out, and I I couldn't believe it. I mean, he's in smack bang in snow leopard land and all around his house. It's true. We saw lots of these pug marks in the path. You could tell that they were out and about. And of course, I I never saw the snow leopard. I could, I could see its trails, sometimes I could feel it. And I think for me, what it came to symbolize was not enlightenment, but the idea that wild nature can exist out of sight, that maybe I have to be okay with not having to see it for myself. I think that was a big part of my discovery.

Learning To Seek Wildness Nearby

Cal 32:13

I traveled a lot, a lot for this book, often in search of things. And towards the end, I started seeing how actually what I was searching for was often an emotional experience of landscape I can have at home in places that not that I know exactly, but are close to familiar places, somewhere that I can wander without having to seek, without having to plan, without having to, you know, sometimes if you're in search of this wilderness experience and you're worrying about mileage or water and how many grams of food you're carrying and how many days it is until you can get back, actually you're in this kind of logistical mindset that's in the way, perhaps, of if it's uh some kind of spiritual or emotional experience that you're looking for, that can disturb it. And I started realizing, oh, I stumble upon these tiny wil wildernesses, these sort of mental wildernesses, my personal wildernesses all the time at home in Scotland. And I think that that is a message that that maybe I started to realize that these bigger, wilder wildernesses, maybe it's it's okay. I I shouldn't go to them, but I'm I hope we can protect them so they can can continue to exist and we don't have to invade them to see them.

AJ 33:25

Wow, that's profound, Carol, because that that was one of my, I guess, reflections and questions as I was reading your book as well. But I was conscious, and you could relate, to what you were looking for, what you were going to these places for. And you did I catch right in a post somewhere you said this book nearly killed you?

Cal 33:45

Yeah, yeah.

AJ 33:47

How so? How so? What was it that I guess was part of that process of coming to this point for you that and that was clearly a little grueling?

Cal 33:57

Yeah, I think

Eleven Trips To Map Wilderness History

Cal 33:58

so. Two things. I think I think one is just the the the more the more mundane side of things, which is like to go out. I did uh 11 international trips in search of when I'm when I plan a book, what I like to do is to to break it down into sort of points or ideas and then and then to find them in reality, you know, pin them, pin them to the map in some way. So this book is essentially a history of wilderness, and I'll start by looking at biblical concepts or spiritual concepts more ancient than the Bible. Um and for that I I traveled to the Sinai Desert to meet uh a modern-day desert monk, and through him and through that journey, sort of tell the story of what people are looking for when they go out into the desert looking for epiphany. Um and then what that turned into as ideas of this have spread around the world, the the desert exile takes all different forms. You know, the Irish missionaries will throw themselves out into the sea, the the Russian startsy would go into the dark forest, and the Yamabushi in in uh Japan will go into the mountains. Um and then I work up through all these different concepts of wilderness since then. It it might move through um hunting reserves all around the world, many of which were created as kind of wilderness preserves, um, move up through romantic ideas of the sublime. Um so for the hunting reserves, I I went on the to shadow um trophy hunters in sub-Saharan Africa in Mozambique. And uh for the sublime, I went to Iceland to have an encounter with a sub a sublime experience which was uh an erupting volcano. And in this way, through a a series of 10, nearly 11 journeys, um come to come to conclusions, be able to understand this history fully by experiencing it for myself. Um so arranging these, going into the Amazon, going to Antarctica, this what it was a lot, it was a lot of time on the on the road, a lot of time on my own going to places, which is a great, a great way to sort of have a have a bit of a breakdown. And and and just I think conceptually trying to get I think the the biggest most grueling thing for me was getting my my head around it all that it it felt at some points like I was trying to teach myself the history of the world. It certainly felt like I was trying to understand a lot of different cultural concepts of wild places to try and find some commonality. And ultimately it came to this sort of sense of what is the best way to put it, that that wilderness often came down to a kind of mysteriousness, um, and that this was what our scientific or geographic approach to wilderness might be able to share with a more sort of spiritual or religious concept that that there should be um mysterious places that we don't control and we don't understand. And I think that that to me has been a kind of spiritual reckoning, I think. Um it's an oddly spiritual book. Um but um I think I've I've managed to sort of write myself through it and and come to a place of um yeah, like reverence. I think I think reverence and and respect for the natural world is is where I ended up working towards. Um I don't know if that answers your question.

AJ 37:37

Oh yes, it so does. It's it's fascinating to think, you know, when you set out on a journey like that, and for for that matter, the sequence of your books, that this is where it comes to, you ended up saying that it's urgent we absorb the understanding that humans can augment or support nature. And that certainly e I mean, even in agricultural spaces, I have found that to be true. Understanding that farming is an anathema to conservation. That s certainly indigenous presence is an anathema to conservation. And even in urban contexts, it reminds me of what Wendell Berry said. It was something along the lines of there's no such thing as places that aren't sacred. It's just we've got places that have been desacralized or something, like the way we've treated them has been sacred, but everywhere is sacred. It reminded me of that because even when we think of about the 30 by 30, I've always just sort of not sat comfortably with that because it's like, yes, we can acknowledge that fencing some stuff off has had its merit and bless, or we'd, you know, heaven forbid what we'd be facing now if we hadn't done that in a way, but by the same token, that we'd still be carving out the sacred from the not sacred in that way. Yeah, it seems that there's a more, I mean, dare I use the word, but holistic way of uh of conceptualizing what we're trying to achieve here, that indeed doesn't have to be mutually exclusive of these parts of society. So there's a a meta-level, if you will, of consciousness and practice that you're alluding to.

Restraint As A Conservation Practice

AJ 39:22

And I mean you use the word more than once, I think, as you sort of came to this around the idea of just restraint versus intervention. And that there's gonna be some real value in that restraint piece for us. Can you flesh that out a bit more for us as well? Like how you came to that and and and what you're seeing?

Cal 39:43

Definitely. Yeah, I th I think the works really well in the Australian context. Like I remember reading while I was researching Thicker Than Water, reading The Greatest Estate on Earth by Bill Gamage. And I know there's been a lot, a lot more um on this sense of how um, for example, Aboriginal practices have have shaped the land. Um, that when outsiders arrived in Australia, they did not recognize this to be a man-impacted landscape, but of course it was. So that has been the case all over the world, um, that new people can blunder into a landscape and not understand what they're looking at. They they see it to be its inhabitants are just the the lucky inheritors of of some kind of magical place. And actually, of course, it's it's been sculpted. You know, they they have sculpted each other over long periods of time. And when, for example, colonial powers were were carving up Africa, um, this was around the same time that there had been a huge drop-off in wildlife numbers, um, because people were suddenly coming in, disturbing whatever sort of balance there had been before in the populations of wildlife because they were shooting loads for fun, they were shooting loads of animals for pangolins or or elephants for tusks, all sorts of things, rhinos for tusks, and so they were seeing these like huge drop-offs in populations. And then part of what they did in response, desperately trying to save these wildlife populations, was bring in these very strict and invasive rules about hunting in Africa. And ultimately that meant that people weren't allowed to use snares and all of these traditional methods that had actually uh been able to coexist with the wildlife numbers before, were now outlawed, and um a strict quota system came in place which um essentially prioritized white hunting over everything else. And this was felt to be a good thing, it was felt to be the only sensible um situation to be done. Uh it was posed imposed from the outside. And I suppose really the solution was kind of less, not more, right? It was to to remove the most recent pressures and allow what had been happening before to continue. Um and so I think that that is a difficult thing to grapple with because we want to do something. Um and I and I think sort of rushing in and doing things, um, we can introduce a new type of problem. And so it's learning how to, yeah, that question of restraint, which might be accepting that we don't always know the answer and that caution is the best approach.

AJ 42:28

Yes. You know, in my mind, I've danced back to islands of abandonment here too. And uh it looks like there's this sort of dawning pattern, and you're just seeing it almost fractalize with your ongoing work. Is this fascinating to me when you said there's a precursor in the field of medicine from the 19th century, where indeed it was being felt at the time that some of the interventionist methods were causing more problems than they were solving, and so there was a thinking that developed to put more faith in the healing power of nature and the body's innate capacity for healing. I didn't know that Western medicine had that at its origins, and then it was just with scientific developments and pharmaceutical developments that we came to the view we've come to more largely today, where it's considered master controllers back on the, you know, got the steering wheel again. That's fascinating that there was this origin story in in Western medicine like that. We just we got seduced again, almost like, you know, with the dams in the landscape, with the pharmaceuticals in the medicine, and with the inputs in the agriculture. We got so good at these things, it looked like, oh, actually, after all, we're gonna control everything. In the end, it's a you know, stand back.

Cal 43:49

I think so. And there, you know, there's still things we don't know, and the the answer is to sort of throw more at it. I think I think you see that a lot in in contemporary psych psychiatry, for example, where a lot of the problems. Problems are still unsolved. And so there can be a tendency, not always, but there can be a tendency to prescribe a lot. And solutions are difficult to come by. And so that yeah, they had this huge reckoning, which was, you know, a lot of what we're doing with these heroic treatments, bleeding and leaching and all sorts of things are destructive. How can we, how can we find the balance when there is no obvious answer? And I think that that's still where we are in some areas of ecology, that many projects that we would describe as rewelding are still are still experimental because we're still figuring out what the long-term effects of our actions are. And we just have to hold that humility in our heads to remember that we're also in progress. We don't, we don't know everything. And so the intervention, we just have to be really, really careful because we um don't always know the long-term effects of what we're doing.

Abandoned Places That Grow Hope

AJ 44:56

I was also fascinated that you found this was after Islands of Abandonment, but it's sort of it's so current now that there's so much talk of collapse. Do you find this, Kel, as well, in in your purview? That I've been really wary of how I mean I was talking about this sure, eight years ago, but I'm so wary of how flippant we can be with it. And I'd probably have other critiques of it too. But I was fascinated that you, particularly after Islands of Abandonment, certainly, or at least then, didn't buy in to the notion that that was inevitable, that that's just gonna happen, collapse is gonna happen. The doomsday scenarios, as they're often called, that they're gonna happen. And you had seen so much through those sites of abandonment, obviously, that had triggered so much learning of what can happen when you least expect it and out of the ruins. And I've seen other stories like this too. But I was fascinated that some of your friends, even, were critical of you for almost as my understanding being a bit Pollyanna, and in so doing, in so doing, sort of jeopardizing some of the work of the people who were trying to hold people to account for doing damage or or indeed trying to advocate for protections and so forth, that you were jeopardizing their work because you're saying, Well, look what can come out of the, you know, that the story's not as bleak as it looks. That's such a fascinating thing that you were confronted by. You came out with this conclusion, you're confronted by people you you know and trust, and yet you still believed. What is it? And how are you seeing it now?

Cal 46:38

One thing I'd I'd sort of say is that I'm I'm I'm not a natural Pollyanna. You know, like temperamentally, I've got to say. And so I just see like writing that book and sort of coming out hopeful was was a surprise to me. Um was it? It was, absolutely. I I think um, you know, one of the reasons that I was drawn to abandonment is almost through this, the the aesthetics of it, right? This that ruin lust that people talk about, and you see these amazing um pictures that are like abandoned hospitals or ballrooms, and they're all grown over with moss, and they're deep deeply melancholy. And I think that something in that spoke to my soul. And so that's where I've initially started coming in. And then I started sort of once you start allowing your eye to adjust, you start appreciating things, you think, this is interesting. Actually, there's a lot here. It's not what I thought a natural environment would look like, but it is a natural environment, actually, these places they've been so uncontrolled for so long that they're wilder than almost anything else out there. Um, because there are very few places that aren't being managed in some way. And I think that that's where a that's where that realization came in was like, oh, these places are are different because nobody's checking what species are in here. And yeah, sure, there's a bunch of invasive species in here, but there's also like incredibly rare beetles. And had somebody been paying more attention and turfed out the common species, probably the weirder stuff would have been turfed out as well. That this sort of like constant gardening of stuff can disturb things constantly. A bit of disturbance is good. Um, but essentially what I came to see was that like one man's um poison is another man's manna in in this context that actually certain environments that are full of heavy metals might support heavy heavy metal-loving plants, which are unusual in nature because in fact there's not that many places where they would naturally grow. And so you have in Wales, for example, there's the a a lot of old mines where they have these incredible lichens that look like paint splatters and they like absorb the metal out of the rock. And all this metal has been brought to the surface by by sort of decades of mining. And and they're really interesting and they're being preserved as scientific curiosities. And you see this all over the place in these really weird um post-industrial, or I started calling them post-human landscapes because they weren't always industrial sites. So, yeah, so from there, yeah, I stumbled across a lot of literature about these post-human landscapes, um, a lot of really interesting cutting-edge, often sometimes controversial work about how these landscapes sort of grow up. They're these feral mixes of stuff. They're definitely not natural. So if you want them to be quote unquote natural, then these are not for you. But if you are willing to accept them as sort of symbols of the dynamism of nature, they're really interesting. And they're sort of I I started calling them forbidden experiments after um this is uh from Scottish history, uh, James I, uh, or rather James VI of Scotland, um reportedly had an experiment when he sent um these children to grow up on an island with uh a deaf nursemaid who wouldn't be able to speak to them, and his idea was that they would grow up speaking the language of God. And this was described as the forbidden experiment. It was too cruel to do, and yet he had done it. And these abandoned sights were forbidden experiments in a in a sense. You know, you would never bring them about. It's completely unethical to create them. They have been created. What can we learn from them? Um, and what I took away from them was this sense that actually once a landscape has been damaged, not all has necessarily been lost forever, that they can recover in different ways. They might not always revert to what they were before. In fact, they almost certainly won't. They will have what's happened to them sewn into their ecological memory that will affect them for the rest of their existence. But that doesn't mean that they can't become valuable in a new way, and that on this increasingly human impacted earth, that this is going to be the case everywhere, that in fact we are all living in landscapes which are are full of species around us, that often we don't pay attention to the value of them, and that we shouldn't sort of sleep on these feral landscapes all around us and the species that are growing up in response to humans, um, if that makes sense.

AJ 51:15

Yeah, yeah, it so does. It's absolutely amazing. They weren't even necessarily entirely post-human environments either, huh? With some of the stories and people that you found in some of these spaces. Yeah, that it's uh fascinating book itself, and then everywhere you went from there with the savage landscape. I can't even I think it was the savage landscape, wasn't it? We were talking about I've just been dancing amongst your

Rahui And Blending Knowledge Systems

AJ 51:41

books. But I'm thinking now about instances of where this has this is happening, where knowledge systems, if you like, are being respected and appreciated together. Certainly there was a book that came out in Australia a while back called Songlines, The Power and the Promise. There was an indigenous author, white woman author, together, and it it launched a series, a first knowledge series. But that first book really landed and became the second most popular podcast ever, even like such an appetite for it, as well as the fact that there's this phenomenon. It's is so brilliant. Basically, they're talking about I can't remember the language they use for it, something like third way. I mean, that's been used a bit, but essentially, what would it mean to bring the knowledge systems together, Western scientific with the song lines, with the indigenous way of knowing here in this context, to transcend both and see what it would be like to combine, appreciate both and combine and and go about navigating what is a new context now for us all, anyway, and with the benefit of working together in that kind of a way. So I was fascinated to read about, I wonder how you pronounce this, Cal, R-A-H-U-I. Is it is it Rahui? That process you were relating to taboo, that there was one recently in New Zealand that was indeed respected by the non-Mori. So there was a sort sort of edict, but you'll explain it better, of no go zone. And this is a familiar enough thing in Australia too, uh, with traditional knowledge, that you do have these sort of places where you don't go, sort of the lockout idea for a time or for times, and that this was called by the Māori culture in New Zealand and respected by other cultures. Can you tell us about that?

Cal 53:23

Yeah, absolutely. I find I find this um really interesting because it is it's a very old concept that is having I don't know if it's accurate to say, a new life, but it's certainly being adopted by the wider culture in New Zealand and it's also still being used in in traditional contexts in certain um Pacific Island cultures of you can call these Rahuis or are or taboos to um essentially ask people not to approach or not go into certain areas. They might be temporary. Um, for example, in a non-environmental context, if someone has been lost at sea or if somebody has drowned in a in a pool, you might call one to say, please people don't go in out of respect. Um and the the landscape will sort of repair in in this time. It's uh it's uh it gives it some time. Um but they can also be called in more environmental context. So for example, there is there they were having problems with a specific kind of infection in a forest. Um forgive me, I've forgotten the the exact details, but they they called one of these to ask people not to walk in this area because it was going to spread the disease among other trees and it would it would hurry up the process. And uh generally speaking, was was well respected. And um what's interesting is that it calls on old traditions, old res that respect for old traditions, which is still very powerful, and it it sort of married up with regions of science. And we've seen this in a few places, so elsewhere there might be these taboos on certain fishing grounds in the Pacific Islands, and local fishermen would not fish in these areas, and then that would allow stocks to rebound. Um, so quite similar to to fishing quota systems, but they're not described in those terms, they're described more in these terms of reverence, of um, you know, have some respect, you know, don't do this. We're we're sort of uh allow things to recover and don't constantly be pushing the boundaries, don't constantly be depleting. And and so I find the the New Zealand example really interesting because um the the government there seems very willing to sort of work with the I guess the the how do you call it like the flow of of existing culture. I th I think that that is really inspiring to to find how you can dance with the way that people are already thinking and and make it work for everyone.

AJ 56:04

Oh yeah, fascinating and brilliant. And I know instances here too where where farmers, so white fellow farmers are inviting First Nations or allowing back onto their own land. I mean, it's all there's all that, but they're broaching that to very rich effect, mutual learned and trust-building effect, which of course harks back to where you were, you know, those 10, 12 years ago in Australia, just bridging the gap, just humbly seeing what was to be taken responsibility for. There, I mean, there's part of that in this too, but perhaps perhaps ultimately, yeah, the prospect of knowing your land in that sense so much more, and then being able to treat it with so much more respect and so much more um to so much more benefit that there's so much on offer if we can manage

Volcano Awe And What Comes Next

AJ 56:57

this. Kel, I'd love to, I mean, as we hedge to our close, I've had your trip to the volcano in Iceland that you raised earlier on my mind quite a bit, because you obviously people weren't weren't allowed to get close to this erupting volcano, but you went to extraordinary lengths to get around the barriers and get pretty close. So I want to come back into that moment by way of leading to a question I have for you. But that you talked of sneaking across the landscape from another angle and getting close, that you were then forced to look away when you got that close because you felt like it was tantamount to facing a god, it's almost too much. But yet you were compelled to look again before you thought you'd quickly sort of hightail it. And I had a little flash because when I was a young guy, I was freediving off the coast of Western Australia here, a fair way out alone. You know, you're not supposed to do it, blah, blah. But no one was no one else was there, so I'm going. And it's a it was a ways out. And to cut a long story short, I was down, I don't know, whatever it was, 10, 15 metres, and there was a tiger shark. I saw the back half of a tiger shark. It was resting, it was the middle of the day. I wasn't going at dawn or dusk, you know. I was being smart in my own mind about it. But I I remember, and since I've recounted this story to people, because it ended up in a shark attack, right? So it wasn't the tiger that attacked me, it was another shark. But I I saw the tiger shark, and I was like, you know, sort of, as soon as you panic underwater, you you gotta come up, you lose any semblance of being able to stay down. So I sort of had the moment of gulp, gently, you know, not to attract attention, go back to the top. And I thought, well, I'm not gonna tempt fate, I'll leave it to him, you know, I'll go. But I just wanna, I just wanna check one more time. You know, I had my moment, I I have to look again, and I went down and wow, that's amazing. And then I, you know, gently up and and went away. So I felt that moment, you know, that felt like you're facing a a power that you must leave. But before you do, you know, you just gotta have one more look. My question for you is in a sense, it's what next for you, having come to the internal place you've come now, where potentially you don't need to put yourself in the jaws of of a volcano or me of a shark, to get the feeling to still access that spirit of things. So what where do you go from here?

Cal 59:38

You know, it's a great question because I'm I'm wondering the same. And I I think you know, I I do think that you always want to feel alive. Yes. And so I th I can't swear to to as at the moment I think you know, you come back from a trip like that and then and then you shiver, shiver in your room for a while. And I had a lot, a lot of trips like that for this pick. So I I had a similar like super, I don't know how I'd even describe it. I so I when I went to the the Amazon to meet with the Yanamami group, and I found that was it like a I don't know if it was even like a culture shock exactly, but like I think feeling so like a fish out of water and the the physicality of that journey, it taking so long to get there, and then it it being very difficult to make myself understood and to be understood because I was speaking across like a double language barrier, had to speak to my guide who did speak English but but not fluently, and then um or not uh I suppose as a native, and then he would speak to the Yanamami, um, like the head man there, and then it would come back. So everything felt very like mirrors around me. And so like mentally I found that that trip really kind of destabilized me for a while, and then I would come and shiver in my room for a bit and be like, Well, I better better go investigate the next part of the wilderness experience. And you know, the so the the book was a wilderness quest for me, you know. I I I wrote the book and I came back changed, and that is like the ultimate in, you know, it's like one of these original plots, it's like the hero's journey, right? I'm still grappling with the element of me coming back changed. And I guess that writing writing is always to me been been a way out of not knowing, um, that I always start from a place of confusion and quandary, and then through writing I bring myself to a new level of understanding and acceptance and all of this. And I I do think I have a a a lot of that about the way that I look at the world through the savage landscape and then and then what next? I'm I'm still all stirred up though. So I I'm uh not quite in a position to be able to kind of talk about new projects because I I find my the beginning of my things are are so wandery. Um and I've I've learned the hard way not to start talking about things until I've actually got them sewn into something solid because they just change. And then people will ask me about them months later. I'm like, oh that no, no. So I think I'm I'm wandering again, unfortunately.

A Fiddle Tune For Mystery

AJ 1:02:30

Unsurprising. All right, Cal. To go out, I always ask my guests what piece of music may have been with you through your journeys, may keep coming back to you in your life, may have just been part of your childhood. But what piece of music occurs to you now that if we could patch one in right now on a podcast, we could do to take us out?

Cal 1:02:52

Um, I would think of uh a Scottish fiddle tune which is called Callum's Road. Um it's it's a relatively recent fiddle tune. It was written about a man who kept asking for a track to be built to his house so his kids could go to school, and um says on Rase, and uh the council didn't get around to it, so he built it himself. And uh the tune tune is rather wonderful and it's simple and catchy, but the reason I keep coming back to it is that it I've played the the violin since I was very young, but um as with my o always my instinct is to to get very disciplined about things, make everything work. And this is the only tune that has ever been taught to me successfully by ear. Um so I can play it without looking at the music, and this is how I would like to be as a musician because I've always been a sort of classical musician glued to my uh music stand I will play weird, you know. You you you might be like the second violin and you're playing quite an abstract role, and so you really have to be that reading and paying attention and all of this kind of thing, and actually playing by ear is where I would like to be. And this book has been teaching me to accept mystery, to accept the irrational and to like move with things, and I think that this this piece of music has come to sort of symbolize that to me, and so maybe while I'm in Glasgow, I'm gonna be more of a fiddler and less of a violinist.

AJ 1:04:14

Oh that's so good, that's so good. I was a rock and roll drummer, so I was I came from that place to begin with, and I used to marvel at the people who can actually play correctly.

Cal 1:04:26

Yeah, there we go. You get a proper feel for it.

AJ 1:04:30

There we go. Well, we will exemplify what we're talking about. We will combine knowledge systems, but I'll get better, more polished, and and you will get freer.

Cal 1:04:39

I would love I would love that.

AJ 1:04:42

Thanks so much for speaking with me. It's been absolutely wonderful to come across your work and and just a lovely conversation. I I'm looking forward to putting it out. Thank you.

Cal 1:04:52

Thank you so much. I I really enjoyed this and I'm so grateful to be asked to do it.

Support The Show And Credits

AJ 1:04:57

That was Cal Flyn, author of the new book The Savage Landscape, How We Made the Wilderness. Out this month in the US through Viking Penguin, and in the UK through HarperCollins. All Cal's books are available via her website, linked in the show notes. If you like what you hear, I hope you'll consider becoming a paid subscriber on Patreon or Substack, where you can get some writing too. This episode was only possible with your support, so thanks very much to new subscriber on Patreon, Ian Brokenshire, and to long-term subscriber Vicky Winton for doubling your subscription amount. Thanks too to Lisa Rock, Neri Kijlstra, and John Martin for your cherished support over three years now. Incredible one and all. And thank you to everyone else for listening and supporting by sharing, rating, and reviewing. I appreciate every bit of it. The music you're hearing is Regeneration by Amelia Barden, and at the top was Scotland Mountains by Angel Salazar. Sourced from Artlist. My name's Anthony James. Thanks for listening.